Progression and Regression

Well, I’m kind of surprised it hasn’t been longer than nearly four months since I sat down to write here! Go me. That feels like progress of some sort. Maybe.

And speaking of progress, there has been very little progress on River of Kurn of late. This is for a number of reasons. First, November is National Novel Writing Month, in which I participate annually. Once again, I managed to finish 50,000 words of a novel in the 30 days of November! And that meant zero coding, because I also helped plan my own high-school reunion (never you mind just how many years we celebrated), plus work was wild. December arrived and work was even wilder, plus those pesky “holiday” things ate up time in terms of thinking, planning, shopping and preparing.

I did make some attempts to code in October, but failed miserably because I got stuck on a totally optional thing. You see, I wanted to build myself a tool to add more questions to the game easily. Of course, adding them isn’t that hard in the first place, but it was infuriating to add the questions to the questions table, then add in rows for those questions in the statistics tables for the blue game as well as the green game. And if there was an issue importing, I’d have to dump the numbers out of the question table and reassign numbers to the questions before attempting again, or I’d go from, say, question 1331 to 1381.

So I was stuck. I’d never coded something to import from a file before. I can do database dumps and backups, but I had never tried to bring data into the database programmatically before. So I got stuck and then I got busy.

I’ve been off work for a full six days now (and have another 10 to go!) and the holidays are now over for me, so when I woke up at 4am today for no apparent reason, I decided to reorganize my plans for my game and I decided to tackle this import issue.

Four hours of testing, testing, testing and testing some more later, I now have an import tool built into the admin section on my game’s website. I mean, it’s not live yet, I’ll do that when I finish adding another 100 questions (about Star Wars this time) and add a couple of other things to the game. I’m going to rework an introduction question, add text to explain the validation link will be sent to the email address you provide, etc. Anyway. I am super jazzed about this, because it makes adding questions so much easier. I literally browse for the CSV file on my computer, upload it and it does everything for me. Victory! (Another victory: managed to renew the SSL cert for the game site and am feeling very proud about this because it was NOT simple.)

In not so great news, my EVGA GTX 1080 Ti video card died on me just over two weeks ago. It lived about 16 months. I saw my holiday plans of gaming and coding vanish before my eyes. While I could always use the integrated graphics to at least use a monitor and actually use my computer, that’s no way to game. I also have a pretty crappy video card that’s been sitting in my old computer, so that’s what’s in my new computer now. I can’t do much in the way of gaming, but I can power a second monitor, so I can at least get some coding done! (As evidenced by my building my import tool.) The other piece of good news is that I was under my manufacturer’s warranty, so I got approved for an RMA (return merchandise authorization) to send EVGA my card and they’ll send me another one. The bad news there is that even though I paid for 1-day shipping, they only attempted delivery on Tuesday, December 24 (and not Monday, December 23), which means that EVGA was closed. Obviously, they were closed on the 25th as well.

Thankfully, the delivery was accepted on the 26th. But now we’re probably looking at them shipping a replacement next week. And, well, their site says “shipping for online/RMA orders will stop completely on Tuesday, 12/31/2019 at 2pm Pacific Time” and will resume the following Tuesday. So if they don’t ship it out today (Friday) or Monday, I probably won’t get my video card until, uh, mid-late January. Even if they ship it today or Monday, I probably won’t get it before the end of my vacation time. This is the universe’s way to tell me to catch up on TV and coding, I guess.

So that brings me to my plans for 2020 for River of Kurn:

0.2.0 release scheduled for January 4, consisting of: 200+ more questions, the tool I created, other bits and bobs and hopefully a way to keep sessions active or allow them to fail gracefully.

0.3.0 release scheduled for January 25, consisting of making things work properly on mobile.